In Defiance of Titles

End Results

2011-11-18T13:57:00-06:00

In my previous post, I shared a jazz chorale I had written for my arranging class on Mancini's classic tune, "The Days of Wine and Roses." As I mentioned in that post, I'd been planning on writing something for the U-Tubes, UNT's jazz trombone ensemble, and I figured the chorale was a good place to start.

Well, over the past couple of months I've taken that chorale and run forward with it, ultimately resulting in a full-length arrangement; in fact, it was publicly debuted this past Thursday at the U-Tubes's performance in the Syndicate:

My arrangement, featuring solos by Jenny Kellogg (trombone) and Evan Oxenhandler (guitar).

I've had Mancini's tune rolling around in my head for years, ever since running across it in a fake book in high school. Until recently, I never really bothered to look up the lyrics; I always just assumed it was your typical romantic ballad, a beautiful celebration of the joys of love and luxury. As it turns out, the lyrics are much darker than I'd expected:

The days of wine and roses
Laugh and run away
Like a child at play
Through a meadow land toward a closing door,
A door marked, "never more,"
That wasn't there before.

The lonely night discloses
Just a passing breeze
Filled with memories
Of the golden smile that introduced me to
The days of wine and roses and you.

The tune was originally written for a 1962 movie by the same name; I haven't seen it myself, but from what I understand it chronicles the lives of a married couple whose lives are destroyed by alcoholism. The title of both song and movie come from a much earlier poem by Ernest Dowson:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

The story behind this song, then, is somewhat different than what I'd always envisioned —it's about lovesickness rather than love, of passions once held but long gone, of beautiful memories lost in painful regrets. That's the story I tried to evoke through my arrangement.

Beyond that, I'll leave the piece to speak for itself —I really enjoyed writing it, and I'm very happy with the end result. Please let me know what you think!

A Reasonably Successful Jazz Chorale

2011-09-16T21:17:00-05:00

This past week in my jazz arranging class, we started talking about chorale writing. In jazz contexts, a "chorale" is a work of polyphonic music played without the rhythm section. Removing the rhythm section sort of changes the rules of the game; you can't rely on their persistent improvisation to make up for a lack of rhythmic or harmonic interest in what's going on elsewhere. As a result, chorale writing is driven by melody, not by groove.

My professor started class on Monday by listing off four basic characteristics to strive towards in jazz chorale writing: independent motion, varied melodic registers, reuse of material from the main theme in the counterlines, and a flexible tempo.

With those basic principles in mind, I went ahead and put together a basic jazz chorale arrangement of Mancini's The Days of Wine and Roses. Since I've been wanting to write something for the U-Tubes (UNT's jazz trombone ensemble), I opened up a blank score with 8 trombone staves and set to work. Here's what I came up with:

The Days of Wine and Roses; trombone chorale by Adam Jensen

Click to play

You can also download the score if you'd prefer to follow along on paper. The arrangement has its problems, but I do think it demonstrates the basic idea pretty well. In fact, I think I'm going to fix it up a bit and then use it as an introduction to a larger chart, which I'll be writing over the course of the semester. Keep watching for more about that piece!

Retrospective

2011-09-11T18:20:00-05:00

Tonight as we were getting ready to start our first kindegarten choir rehearsal at church, one of the kids took some building blocks and created his own replica of the NYC World Trade Center towers. No doubt he'd been learning about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks at school, what with this being the tenth anniversary and all. It was sort of odd to think of the perspective from which he saw those events; for him, 9/11 is just something out of a history book, albeit a very serious something. For those of us who watched it all unfold on TV, it's something quite more than that.

Back then I was a freshman in college, just getting started on the jazz performance degree I would not ultimately complete. I remember seeing the news reports on a TV set up in the lobby of UNT's Bruce Hall, just after I'd had a nice cafeteria breakfast; I can still taste the orange juice (from concentrate, of course).

As far as I knew classes were still proceeding on schedule, so I made my way to the music bulding for my morning theory class. The class was full; none of us had really quite figured out how to react to what had happened. My theory professor took the podium and informed us that classes had been cancelled.

Then, he did something I will never forget, something that really helped me put everything in context. It seemed appropriate, he told us, that we should all sing a hymn together, to help us find an anchor in troubling times. (Amusingly, he also said that if we didn't believe in God, we could sing solfege.) I believe the hymn we sang was God the Omnipotent (lyrics); we had been studying it in class as an example of traditional harmony, so we already knew it pretty well. We may have also sung Eternal Father, Strong to Save (lyrics), but I may be remembering that wrong. It was a beautiful experience either way, uniting our voices in a song to the Lord, in a context where hymns are usually only a subject of academic study.

Later that evening I wrote the following in an email to friends back home:

I just wanted to write you all and express my hope that everyone is dealing with today's events well. And at the risk of being unpopular, I also want to remind everyone to pray. Some of you might not be too excited about the prospect, but I can guarantee it will be productive, not only to help the immediate rescue efforts and such, but also to bring about whatever greater good God has coming out of this.

That's what He does; we screw things up, and He fixes them. It doesn't always seem like it, but remember that the absolute greatest evil ever done by mankind (the murder of His Son) turned into the absolute greatest good for mankind. That's an historical fact, whatever you believe.

Things definitely look horrible for our nation at the moment, and the carnage that happened today will not be undone. But just you watch what happens next if the people of God get down on their knees.

The people of God did get down on their knees after 9/11, at least for awhile. In the weeks that followed, it seemed like everyone was talking about God. It was also a time of great unity in our nation even apart from faith; the sense of having a common enemy will do that to a people.

But then for some reason we went nuts again. The other day I read an article from the Onion entitled Nation Would Rather Think About 9/11 Than Anything From Subsequent 10 Years; unlike most Onion articles, it was only a little facetious. In the past ten years, the American economy has turned upside down, and the political system has become almost comically divisive. For some reason, the unity we all felt after September 11 has vanished, to be replaced by relentless, uncompromising bickering in Congress, rampant sensationalism in the media, and a cultural attitude toward religion that would probably rather condemn my professor for singing a Christian hymn in a state-funded classroom than laud his willingness to address his students' most basic need to find comfort in a Creator who cares for them.

So, ten years after the World Trade Center went down, I would like to reiterate what I told my friends years ago. We still need to pray for our nation, perhaps harder than ever. We live in dangerous times, not just because of the threat of terrorism (that's always been around), but because we seem to have lost our ability to unite in any meaningful way, to compromise, to acknowledge a universal standard of right and wrong …and most importantly, to humble ourselves before the God in whose hands rest the pillars of the earth. We remembered those things after September 11; we need to remember them again.

Ant Bite Blues

2011-09-10T17:41:00-05:00

You know, no matter how much complex modern harmony they teach me, I do still love me some twelve-bar blues. Here's one I made up the other day before work:

I decided to call it "Ant Bite Blues," in honor of the fact that moments before I recorded it I was bitten on the foot by a fire ant out in my front yard. It's not my best performance, but I think it's fair work considering how little shedding I've been able to do lately. Besides, no matter how many mistakes I may have made, listening to this recording is a lot more fun than getting that ant bite.

As always, if you're interested in hearing more of my trombone playing, please have a listen to my Musical Résumé.

Baby's First Education

2011-09-04T22:33:00-05:00

My daughter Ellie is now ten months old, and due to the fact that her mother and I both work full time, we recently enrolled her in a local day care program. It wasn't the easiest decision to make, as we'd both love to be able to stay home and take care of her ourselves; however, the experience has not been without its own unique joys. To help myself remember, I thought I'd share a few.

Art Projects

It's silly, but one of the things I've been looking forward to most as a dad is the day when I get to put my child's art up on the fridge. Regrettably, our stainless steel fridge doesn't really satisfy that use case …so, I figured I'd post some of Ellie's first artwork here instead:

I like to think it's a sort of purple fish.

It may seem sort of silly to have kids do these kinds of projects this young; it's messy and the end result is far from profound. For the kids, however, it's a fascinating new experience. It's a beautiful thing, really; at this age, kids haven't yet learned to be competitive about creativity —they get to learn to enjoy it first. I hope Ellie will carry that lesson with her as she gets older and pursues other creative outlets.

Socialization

Ellie's mother and I are both somewhat introverted; Ellie, on the other hand, makes friends without trying wherever she goes. At restaurants she always picks someone out from one of the surrounding tables and gets their attention with a little smile and a wave; invariably they smile back, and you can tell they enjoy the evening more because of it.

She's the same way at day care —she not only enjoys playing with the other kids, but she sometimes even spends time trying to make their day better. Her teacher sent home the following note a week or two ago:

[Ellie] was such a sweetheart to her friend who was crying on the carpet. Ellie went over and laid her head on her screaming friend and patted her. So cute! :)

This is not to say that she's always going around comforting her fellow babies; later on in the same note her teacher wrote:

Ellie also had fun mimicking another friend's cry.

Not quite as friendly, but still valuable socialization!

I suspect that the social skills she's learning are going to be a great asset to her later in life. I'm also very proud of her for caring about other kids, even without knowing them very well; that's a rare gift even among adults.

Education

One of the nice things about Ellie's day care is that they provide much more for the kids than just basic supervision —they have a curriculum, and are constantly teaching the kids new skills and experiences.

In fact, she's learning a few things at day care that Jamie and I wouldn't even know how to teach her at home. For example, her teachers are already exposing her to common words in sign language and Spanish: please, thank you, water, stars, and so forth. I'll be interested to see if she makes use of these new vocabularies as she starts to speak in the coming months.

One other interesting tidbit: they're apparently teaching her a few simple yoga poses, though I doubt she's going to be doing them on her own anytime soon!

I'm a very firm believer in the importance of education for every child, even regardless of the possible economic benefits. To tell you the truth, I think our society has gone a little nuts if we all think that the only reason to educate children is to prepare them for the job market. It's worth so much more than that —education enriches the lives of our children by showing them that there is always more to discover about the world around us and the condition in which we find ourselves as humans. (It also prepares them to be more responsible citizens at the voting booth and elsewhere, which is why I believe it is the government's duty and best interest to fund it properly …but that's another discussion for another post.)

Perhaps most importantly, formal education inspires informal self-education, at least when done correctly. The mark of a properly-educated man or woman is that he or she does not believe that one's education ends with a ceremony or a certificate; it continues, self-directed and self-disciplined, until one meets the final Teacher and sees face to face the Subject which we all study "as in a mirror dimly". I'm not sure it even ends then.

Here's hoping Ellie never loses the curiosity that drives her now, and that her educators remain ever committed to its encouragement.

Semester Projects

2011-08-31T21:54:00-05:00

This semester at UNT I'm going to be taking graduate-level jazz arranging. We've only had a few class sessions so far, but I can already tell it's going to be an interesting term.

Class projects

One of the things I'm most excited about is the opportunity to prepare and present some of my own research; we're expected to do one or two brief presentations over the course of the semester on writers who have contributed significantly to the history of the art.

I'm excited about this because it's an opportunity for self-education. The assignment is pretty freeform: pick an arranger, figure out what you can say about him/her in fifteen minutes, and say it. We weren't told what books to use, what structure to follow, or what type of grading rubric to expect. In other words, it's the kind of project people do outside of school.

I've decided to study three arrangers from three different periods: Sy Oliver, Slide Hampton, and Darcy James Argue. In addition to the work I have to do for class, I'm also planning to publish some of the information I find here on this blog, if for no other reason than to ensure I remember it better when it comes time to present it in class.

Personal projects

Beyond all that, I really need to get down to business on my own arranging work. Unfortunately, I frequently rely on my coursework to set the parameters for my writing; it's rare that I come up with a project all on my own and pursue it to completion. I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the accountability inherent in formal study —you can't really just give up on a project when you've paid through the nose to have a professor grade you on it.

In the real world, however, there's just as much accountability —it's just that you don't pay for it in tuition money. I'm starting to realize that if I want to write, I'm going to need to seek out real-world projects with real-world parameters and deadlines.

With that in mind, my plan moving forward is to get in touch with a few ensembles to see if they could use an arrangement or two. I'd love to write something for the U-Tubes, and maybe try my hand at orchestral writing for my church's music ministry. My trombone section there has suggested from time to time that I should write some jazz trombone quartets; maybe that'd be a good place to start.

One more thing: I've been trying to finish up the same big band chart for the last year and a half. It's called Undercurrents, and I'd love to share it with you; unfortunately I can't seem to get the introduction right. It's almost there, and with any luck I'll have a recording by the end of the semester …just wanted to say so in public, so I have no excuse not to finish the thing.

I'm writing all this so that I'm accountable: I want to have some specific writing projects defined and in progress by mid-September, and I don't think that will be difficult to do …I just need to know that I have to do it. Now that I've said I will, I do. So there you have it: accountability.

Please keep watching for more information as these projects unfold!

Yet Another Blogging Platform

2011-08-29T14:00:00-05:00

Well, it's that time again: I've decided to switch blog platforms. To commemorate the occasion, I thought I'd share a little bit of my personal blogging history.

Xanga, 2005-2006

Way back in the dark ages of blogging, my friends and I all got our first online journaling fix through Xanga. At the time it kind of filled the role that Facebook fills for a lot of folks now: it was a place to say whatever was on your mind whether it mattered or not, and get lots of random feedback from as many friends as you could collect. That was kind of nice, in a way …I think my Xanga site got more comments than all my other blogs combined since then.

Unfortunately, it was also quite ugly. Over time we all drifted onto more elegant platforms: most to Facebook, some to LiveJournal, and a few to things like Blogger and Wordpress, which we had all only just heard of. I think the reason I finally left Xanga was that I wanted to have a "real" blog, one that would be read by family and friends outside of my immediate college circle. And so, we move along.

Blogger, 2006-2007

Back in 2006 I was really into all things Google; it was only natural, then, that I would be drawn in by the appeal of Blogger. In 2006 I set up the perpetually-untitled jazzslider.blogspot.com, many of whose posts have followed me forward to successive platforms. For the most part I kept my Blogger site personal; I wanted to communicate with family and friends, but not necessarily shout my thoughts at random into the blogosphere.

I did, however, start to develop an interest in tech blogging towards the end of my tenure at Blogger. I had recently gotten a full-time position as web developer for UNT's international office, and was starting to think of things to share. At first I posted these tech pieces on my Blogger site …but then I discovered Wordpress.

Wordpress, 2007-2009

Wordpress had, and still has, quite the following among the web developer crowd. It was elegant, highly functional, and just felt more mature than Blogger at the time. I originally started In Defiance of Titles (the Wordpress version) as an experiment with the platform; I figured I'd start posting my technical content there, keeping Blogger around in the meantime for personal stuff. It didn't take long before I realized that Wordpress was a lot more fun to use, and just started posting everything there.

Wordpress took me through some of my most productive blogging experiences; I wrote an extensive series on building a home NAS appliance, along with a few PHP and Zend Framework development posts, a few of which even got syndicated by phpdeveloper.org. By late 2009, however, I was ready for a change.

Blahg, 2009-2011

In 2008 I had accepted a position as a systems administrator in the UNT Central Web Support office. It was a different sort of work than I had been doing before that point —very little development. While I greatly enjoyed the opportunity to learn a new skillset, I missed programming, especially working with Zend Framework. To keep up my chops, I decided to write my own custom blogging platform, quaintly titled "Blahg", on top of Zend Framework and Doctrine.

When Blahg was ready, I also took the opportunity to start self-hosting on SliceHost at jazzslider.org; this gave me complete control over my entire blog platform, all the way down to the operating system. I loved it; having my own custom solution really gave me a lot of control over how my content was published. I still kept the Wordpress blog around for the SEO value of my major series, but Blahg was all I really wanted to use for a long time.

Recently, however, I've started to feel the cost of running such a custom solution, in more ways than one. For starters, my SliceHost account is running me $25 per month —way too much when you consider that there are free platforms out there that do most of the same stuff. Besides that, the cost of maintaining custom software is more than monetary: anytime I wanted to improve something, I'd have to code it myself. I enjoy that, but I also enjoy writing …and that's why I have a blog, after all.

Octopress, 2011-

That brings us up to the present day. A couple of days ago I ported all my old content—Blahg, Wordpress, Blogger, and even some Xanga—into an instance of Octopress on my home server. Octopress is a wrapper around the Jekyll static site generator, which allows you to generate a completely static website from a collection of flat files living on your local computer. You can then publish the generated website to any host that supports static content …no need for fancy databases or scripting languages. The best part is that you can write your posts in a wide variety of syntaxes, including Markdown —which has quickly become one of my favorite writing tools, even for non-web content.

I'm hosting the new site in the Amazon cloud, using their free usage tier to cut the costs (at least for the first year). Ultimately, all this means I can run a full-featured blog site, retain full control of the presentation, and pay exactly nothing per month to do it. Sounds good to me!

So there you have it: six years' worth of blogging platforms, all resolving down to a good old-fashioned static website. Life does take its turns, doesn't it?

Flood Relief: An Appeal

2011-06-27T00:00:00-05:00

As you may have seen in the news recently, the state of North Dakota has been experiencing record flooding over the past several weeks. In Minot, my hometown, nearly a fourth of the city's population has been evacuated (twice, actually); the Souris River, which runs through the center of town, has risen to nearly 13 feet above flood stage, nearly 4 feet higher than the worst flood the city had ever seen before. The indundation zone covers almost a fourth of the city.

The last reports I heard indicated that more than 4000 homes were affected, 100 of which were flooded up to roof level. Unfortunately, in recent years most residents were told they didn't need flood insurance; as a result, there were only 476 active flood insurance policies in the city this year.

My parents' neighborhood is in pretty bad shape; fortunately, they were able to move with many of their belongings out to the family farm north of town. Not everyone was that fortunate. From what I've read, FEMA has approved a certain amount of individual assistance for those affected, but that'll only go so far.

I'm sure you can appreciate the dire need these people are experiencing as a result of this catastrophe. In order to assist with the relief effort, several organizations have set up donation websites; a good list is available at http://rallyminot.com/donate/. If you can spare some money to help out the victims of this disaster, I know they would appreciate it; so would I.

Additional information and pictures covering the situation can be found by visiting the KX News Minot Facebook page.

Six Months as a Dad

2011-04-17T00:00:00-05:00

Hello again! It's been awhile since I've posted anything on here, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share some thoughts on fatherhood.

You see, recently I became a dad. You may have been expecting this if you read my blog from time to time, as I posted one of my daughter's earliest sonograms last May. It's ironic, however, that in that post I referred to her as "the tiniest Jensen;" that "tiniest Jensen" arrived on October 20, 2010, weighing in at a whopping 10 pounds, 9 ounces.

Size, however, is not without its advantages in an infant. We did have a few weeks of sleepless nights as she adjusted to her new life, but by Thanksgiving she was sleeping through the night, all night, every night. She's also just about the happiest little baby I've ever seen in my life. She's kept ahead of the curve on size too; yesterday we put her in clothes designed for a 12-month-old, and she's not quite 6 months old herself.

So, milestones so far? Let's see here…

Smiled on the day she was born. Smiled in response to "I love you" by January 3rd.
Lifted her head during tummy time at 17 days.
First time at church on November 7th. (She did great, but it'd be awhile before we took her back; the pediatrician suggested we wait until after her two-month vaccinations.)
Laughed in her sleep on November 10th.
Had her first diaper explosion on November 15th.
Played the piano for the first time on November 21st. (Granted, it was a five-key piano played with the feet, but still.)
First trip to visit Jamie's parents ("Honey" and "Poppy", for the record) on November 24th.
First time left with Honey and Poppy so Mommy and Daddy could see a movie on November 26th.
Discovered she loves Christmas trees on November 30th.
Visited Mommy on her first day back at work on December 15th.
Watched the Muppet Movie for the first time on December 29th. Also on December 29th: graduated to size 2 diapers.
Saw her first ice sculpture show at the Gaylord Texan on January 1st.
First (and hopefully last) major car accident on January 5th (more on that another time).
Laughed her head off at Daddy's fake hiccups on January 12th.
Rolled over from tummy to back on February 5th.
Stole Daddy's glasses on February 14th.
First rice cereal on February 12th.
First carrots on February 21st.
Rolled over both ways on February 23rd.
Went to her first book fair on February 24th.
Sat up on February 27th.
First time in the church nursery on March 6th.
Outgrew her cradle (and size 2 diapers) on March 7.
Got her first tooth on March 25th. Three days later, got her second tooth right next to it.
Got up on all fours on March 27th.
Started crawling just last week, on April 14th.

I love being a dad so far, as you can see. It's definitely a life change, but very much for the better. I'll try to keep you posted, though I'm sure you can tell by now why I've been so quiet lately!

Derivative Creativity

2010-08-20T00:00:00-05:00

When I write, one of the most difficult things to deal with is the sense that I'm not really creating anything unique—that my music is somehow derivative, either of my own earlier work or of somebody else's. This is understandable—there are only so many notes in the scale, so many chord qualities and rhythmic subdivisions to play with. Jazz mitigates the problem somewhat by pushing the envelope—by allowing more complex rhythms, chord progressions, and melody-bass relationships—but no matter how far you push, the problem is still there. This can be discouraging, but I'm not so sure it should be.

I like Star Trek. Sometimes a little too much. You can tell, because the next part of this post is an oddly relevant dialog I copied from the TNG third season episode "The Ensigns of Command"; I think it frames the issue rather nicely. (For those of you unfamiliar with the show, Data is a Pinnochio figure: an emotionless android who wants to be human.)

Picard: The good doctor was kind enough to provide me with a recording of your concert. Your performance shows …feeling.
Data: As I have recently reminded others, sir, I have no feeling.
Picard: It's hard to believe. Your playing is quite beautiful.
Data: Strictly speaking, sir, it is not _my_ playing. It is a precise imitation of the techniques of Jascha Heifetz and Trinka Bronkin.
Picard: [shakes head] Is there nothing of Data in what I'm hearing? You see, you chose the violinists. Heifetz and Bronkin have radically different styles, different techniques, and yet you combined them successfully.
Data: I suppose I _have_ learned to be …creative, sir—when necessary.
Picard: Mr. Data, I look forward to your next concert.

I like how this discussion frames the problem. Data is a machine, so he's already lacking in one area typically considered necessary for creative work: emotion. However, he does have drive. Throughout the series, Data's chief drive (maybe even "passion") is to become more human. This leads him to pursue all kinds of artistic endeavors: painting, acting, music…anything he thinks will help him connect more meaningfully with his human creators. Surprisingly, he frequently succeeds, despite lacking the raw, subjective emotional ingredients we typically believe are necessary for such creativity.

In this instance, Data's creative experiment with the violin involves a simple proposition: pick two master violinists, combine their styles, and see what happens. As Picard points out, this, despite requiring no emotion, is in and of itself a creative act. By choosing the violinists, Data has staked a claim in the resulting art; by calculating the best combination of their techniques, he has come up with something only he could have come up with. He didn't have to invent anything per se, only to build out of what had already been invented by others. This kind of creativity, by definition, is derivative…but it is creativity.

Data's approach here is hardly unique. Heck, in the real world, musicians take the building blocks of one anothers' work all the time (often without realizing it), resulting in countless songs leveraging the same basic chord progressions. Not surprising; even jazz musicians (who love pushing envelopes) do the same thing with rhythm changes and the twelve-bar blues.

Given how common this is, I wonder why we so often think that truly "creative" folks are magically extracting brand-new ideas out of thin air. Who has ever done such a thing? Isn't all creativity derivative to some degree? If someone could come up with something totally novel, something that didn't depend at all on earlier ideas, would any of us understand it? If Data, instead of learning to play the violin after the tradition of the masters, had decided to invent a totally original approach to the instrument, I doubt the crew would have wanted to listen to it; it may have been original (maybe even beautiful to those who understood its mathematical qualities), but it would also have been so totally unfamiliar as to evoke all the emotional response of white noise.

Bottom line is this: we have to get our ideas from somewhere, and pushing that envelope will only get you so far. I think I'm going to stop worrying about it and just enjoy the ride.

Introducing the tiniest Jensen

2010-05-06T00:00:00-05:00

My wife and I are very excited to inform you, dear readers, that we are expecting our first child in October!

Here's my favorite picture so far:

When this ultrasound was done, the baby was around 4cm long, with a heart rate of 161 beats per minute. I'm amazed at how quickly and precisely the child has grown; you can find all sorts of statistics about this online so I won't rehash the details here, but suffice it to say, the process is nothing short of miraculous.

Funny sidenote: the baby's heartrate has tracked pretty well with the tempo of my big band arrangement. During the final readthrough Jamie was across town at a doctor's appointment; that day the baby clocked in at around 158 bpm, which is right where my big band recording settled in. This, of course, proves without question that the child will be a jazz musician one day :)

Jazz arranging, round two

2010-05-05T00:00:00-05:00

It's been a busy few months. Among other things, I've been finishing up my second semester of jazz arranging at UNT, which included two major projects I'd now like to share here.

First, I've written my first big band arrangement since high school. The assignment was to arrange a jazz standard, so I chose an old favorite of mine: Rogers and Hart's I Could Write a Book. The following recording was done by the UNT Three O'Clock Lab Band last week; I believe the trombone soloist is David Winniford.

I Could Write a Book

Click to play

I felt pretty good about the project overall. Still a few things I'd fix if I had it played again, though—for one thing, I don't think I really understand how to use the trumpet section in the middle register. For a first go-round, though, this isn't half bad.

Immediately following the big band project, we were assigned something a bit simpler: write an original 32(ish)-bar tune, get it recorded, and turn in the lead sheet. I named my project "Like Waking Up," which is how I've sometimes described the experience of studying music again after such a long hiatus. The personnel on this recording are me on trombone, Tim Chernikoff on piano, Cliff Chen on bass, and Greg Sadler on drums.

Like Waking Up

Click to play

Also, for what it's worth, I've added a Facebook "Like" button to all of my blog pages; if you enjoyed these recordings and you want to share them with your friends, click the button and a link to this blog post should show up in your Facebook news feed. At least I think that's how it works; haven't really tested it yet :)

Thanks for listening!

Drupal Edu Initiative launched

2010-03-08T00:00:00-06:00

I mentioned awhile back that one of my coworkers and I were considering putting together a simple resource site for Drupal users in educational contexts; today, http://drupaledu.org is live (many thanks to Acquia for providing the hosting)!

The initiative was born out of discussions at DrupalCamp Austin last fall; many of the folks we spoke with there were frustrated at how infrequently universities share information with one another on web issues. Since we at UNT CWS believe Drupal is a very useful tool in solving a lot of the typical web problems educational institutions face, we figured this kind of site would help tear down the silos and improve things for everyone.

At the moment, the site is very simple—authenticated users can post links to relevant outside sites, participate in forums, and vote on the usefulness of other user-contributed content. We hope the community will really get involved in this; the more people contribute content, the more useful the initiative becomes.

If this sounds interesting to you, please take a moment to check out http://drupaledu.org. And of course, if you have some Drupal-in-education-related content to share, please do; the more the merrier!

It's different when you hear it

2010-03-05T00:00:00-06:00

The first major project in this semester's jazz arranging class was a simple, 8-bar melody orchestration for brass and rhythm section—all told, no more than 15 seconds of music. The idea was to give us an opportunity to hear how we're doing before applying what we know to a full-length big band chart. The project was due on Monday, and we recorded them all live in a two-hour demo session Wednesday afternoon (I got to play in the trombone section, which was both fun and repetitive).

In keeping with tradition, I thought I'd post a recording of my project, along with a few comments. To tell you the truth, before I heard it out loud with the right instrumentation, I thought I had done a pretty good job. Once I did hear it, it still wasn't terrible—but there are a few things I wish I had done differently. Here, to begin with, is the recording:

Just Friends, 8-Bar brass orchestration

Click to play

And, for reference, the score:

And now, some comments:

In bars 4-6, I decided to go with unison trumpets supported by trombones in density (one of several stock techniques we've been learning). I do like the effect, but the trombone harmonies I decided on are extremely plain. If I did this exercise again, I'd probably change the chord on beat 3 of bar 5 to add some extra color. Either that, or have the trombone chord slide up a half step and then back down again with the trumpet lead.
The trombone rhythms in 4-6 are completely out of sync with the trumpets. If nothing else, move both half notes back one eighth note to line them up with the trumpets, and take out that silly punch on beat 1 of bar 6 (the rhythm section can handle the setup for beat 2 just fine on its own).
I'm also not a fan of my trombone lead lines; I chose them more with regard to their intervallic relationship with the lead trumpet than for their own melodic integrity. I'm especially unhappy with beats 1-2 of bar 6, where the lead trombone actually moves down a third at a key climax of the passage—it just doesn't seem to fit. Either of the above two corrections, however, would seem to fix this problem by keeping the intensity relatively high until after bar 6.

So, hopefully by writing this down I will have solidified these particular lessons in my head, and might be able to avoid them on my full big band chart. That's due in April, so if you follow along, I imagine you'll get to find out if I succeed or not.

Now listening

2010-03-02T00:00:00-06:00

This past month's ITA Journal included an article titled "What's on your iPod?" The article featured the must-have playlists of several high-profile trombonists, and I think I'm going to be referring back to it frequently as I expand my music library over the next several months.

In the spirit of that article, though I am a much, much lower-profile trombonist than anyone featured in it, I thought I'd share a few of the albums I've been listening to lately. Here goes:

Of these, I'd like to call special attention to two: Jiggs Whigham and Wolfgang Kohler's Two-Too and Joshua Redman's Back East.

The former (Two-Too) is an excellent example of what I love about the trombone: it sings. Whigham has been one of my favorite trombonists for a long time (I even play his signature trombone), in no small part because his melodies are all so convincing. Oftentimes improvisers (myself included) sound like they're just stringing together a battery of go-to licks); Whigham, however, always seems to be relaxedly composing beautiful new ideas. He really highlights the vocal qualities of the trombone, and this album's duet format helps that shine through even more than usual.

Redman's album (Back East) shares a lot of the same qualities, though it's quite a bit more adventurous on the arranging side of things. The artist has taken great pains to refresh several old standards with playful new rhythms (including a lilting 7/8 rendition of East of the Sun), but never loses track of the heart and soul of the original when doing so. His sense of time and groove are impeccable (see especially The Surrey With the Fringe on Top), and his improvisations unique and engaging.

So that's what I'm listening to these days. It's kind of nice to be hearing new music again; ironically, I'm doing a lot more listening now that I'm not a full-time music student …I have (a bit) more money to spend on it, and a lot more time to listen (since I'm in front of a computer all day). No complaints here, though—I love music, and if I get to hear more of it, that's a wonderful thing.

Hope you enjoy these albums as much as I do.

What little I know about writing transitions

2010-02-26T00:00:00-06:00

Yesterday evening I spent a lot of time hammering out some new lead lines for various sections of my jazz arranging project. This is probably the longest piece of music I've ever written, so I'm finding it a bit difficult to keep my eyes on the big picture; instead, I'm discovering I have a tendency to "chunk" things too much, such that each successive section of the piece follows right after the one before it with very little transitional material.

Actually, in Wednesday's class we talked about this issue quite a bit; the lecture was given by guest artist Lyle Mays, and he spent most of his time discussing how each section of his piece proceeded naturally from the next. It was a bit eye-opening for me; up until now we haven't really spent much class time on how transitions are supposed to work.

That said, the topic has come up from time to time; here are some of the techniques I've learned so far, some from my lab instructor and some from the Lyle Mays session on Wednesday:

Overlap. Before switching to a new texture, introduce it as a background, while the original texture is still going on. For instance, if you're about to hand the melody off from the brass to the saxes, bring the saxes in with background figures a couple of bars beforehand. This one has been suggested quite often, and works quite nicely.
Pedal point. Kind of an obvious trick, but it's one of the few I know at this point: when transitioning between choruses, adding a vamp of several bars over a pedal bass note can help build tension. (I think I overuse this.)
Sequencing (and other development strategies). Again, towards the end of a section, it's kind of nice to take a piece of the last melody phrase and pass it around to different instruments in different keys/registers. This seems to help build tension and volume; I'm using this technique to introduce my shout chorus. (Seems like this is often combined with pedal point.)

If you need melodic material for a transitional section (or background figures), take a look at the themes you've used already, including the head melody. There's probably material there you can adapt (or just flat reuse) to make your transitions work. You might think you're cheating, or that the audience will be annoyed at having to hear the same material again, but if you don't overdo it, it actually lends a great deal of cohesion to the piece.

So that's what I've learned so far. Anybody else have any ideas?

Everything I know

2010-02-23T00:00:00-06:00

This semester in jazz arranging, I'm learning the basics of big band writing; in fact, the primary project for the whole semester is a single big band chart. The project is broken down logically into smaller assignments by chorus: for example, one week I might have to bring in the lead line for the head chorus, and the next week I'd follow it up with the melody for my sax soli. I like the approach; I think my brain is hard-wired to think of complex wholes in terms of small building blocks.

Sometimes, however, I find myself using too many different kinds of blocks. Each week my lab instructor has given me the same advice: "don't write everything you know all at once." Case in point: my original head chorus started with a simple unison small group melody, but expanded to harmony and then counterpoint within two or three bars. By the end of the first 32 bars, it had built itself up into one hot mess.

My lab instructor gave me the usual advice: "don't write everything you know;" in this case, he meant that using too many different textures in a single 32-bar chorus could be a bit overwhelming, taking away from the cohesion of the section and leaving you nowhere to go for the rest of the chart. Instead, he suggested, why not start the small group in three-part harmony and then have one instrument wander off into counterpoint occasionally throughout the chorus? So that's what I did, and the end result is a lot better.

I think this is sort of a common problem among artists in new mediums; we get so excited about the new expressive tools at our disposal that we forget simplicity. We also forget that the observer of the art will not pay it nearly as much attention as we did when we were making it; and so something that seems repetitive or over-simplified from the artist's standpoint may actually be just right in the eye (ear?) of the beholder.

This is not, of course, to say that complexity is to be avoided at all costs …it's just that it might be a good idea to build up to it instead of introducing it all at once.

Better performance please

2010-02-16T00:00:00-06:00

Over the last few months I've been pretty dissatisfied with the performance of this blog. Not only were page load times sometimes upwards of 10 seconds, but occasionally my swap usage would max out and crash the server, requiring a hard reboot. And it's a blog, for crying out loud—nothing this simple should ever flat-out crash a server, even if it's only got 256MB of RAM.

Well, this past weekend my employer closed down for a couple of days due to our own little Dallas Snowpocalypse, and I had the chance to implement a single, simple fix I'd been planning for some time. Here are the results in terms of home page ping time:

So what did I do? Simple: I switched my web server software from Apache to Nginx. The hardest part was setting up the PHP FastCGI process; although there are lots of instructions online as to how to do this, most of them seem a bit outdated. I ended up using an init script from the Nginx wiki; once that was taken care of, it was a simple matter of converting my Apache confs to Nginx's syntax, switching the ports over, and watching my site's performance improve fantastically.

So there you have it—my blog is now practically readable again, and it turns out the performance problems had nothing to do with my programming! Good news on all fronts today.

Of practice recordings and data storage

2010-02-11T00:00:00-06:00

Those who know me well know that I really, really hate to throw away data. I have all kinds of stuff sitting around on my home server, some of it dating all the way back to middle school, and most of it of very little interest to anyone today (even me). Well, the other day I stumbled across something that was sort of interesting: trombone practice recordings I'd made early on in college.

For as long as I've been a musician, my teachers have told me that one of the best ways to discover where you need to improve is to record yourself playing; for some reason, however, I've rarely bothered.

It's partly a discipline problem—I've never been as consistent a practicer as I should be—but I think it may also have something to do with my data obsession. When I make a recording, I don't just listen to it a few times, note the things I need to fix, and then throw it away. No, I think to myself, "what if I want to listen back to this five years from now and hear if I've improved?" And so I keep it, and not just as an MP3…no, I keep the original, huge, lossless WAV file. For-ev-er.

Now, this used to take up one heck of a lot of space, and a lot of manual backup effort too. As a result, I would rarely do it …too much effort to archive a daily audio practice session when I've got other things I need to store in that precious space.

These days I don't worry about that, for two reasons:

Storage is cheap. I have a 500GB RAID-1 network attached storage device in my living room. If it fills up (which won't be happening soon), I'll just get bigger drives; they don't cost that much in the long run.
Not all compression is lossy. If I re-encode my original WAVs to lossless FLACs via some automated process, I can store them in half the space and still play them back without uncompressing …no data loss, and very little loss of convenience.

As a result, I've started recording my practice sessions again. This has had a few important benefits:

I can listen to my playing after the fact, discovering issues I didn't notice the first time around.
I actually practice regularly, since I don't want my archives to be missing a day when (if?) I look back into them five years from now.
Also, I've found it a lot easier to notice the negative effects of skipping a day of practicing.

But at the end of the day, the best benefit is that I'm starting to recover some of my old improv chops. I've still got a long ways to go, but it's really encouraging to feel somewhat skilled at the trombone again.

DrupalCamp video posted

2010-02-11T00:00:00-06:00

Last November my coworker Adrian Rollett and I got the opportunity to present a talk at DrupalCamp Austin; I've blogged about the content previously, but now that the video is up, I thought I'd post it here as well. Without further ado…

Automating Drupal Deployment with drush_make and Features from Four Kitchens on Vimeo.